Click the link for the couple of tables referenced in the text. Cheers, RAH -------- <http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/1997/spring/art4sp97.htm> Naval War College Spotting Trouble Identifying Faltering and Failing States Richard J. Norton and James F. Miskel In the past several years, images of American servicemembers hurriedly deploying to various parts of the developing world in response to collapses of state governments have become relatively common. For example, in 1995 U.S. troops kept uneasy watch on the borders of the disintegrating Former Republic of Yugoslavia, patrolled the streets of Haiti, dealt with streams of refugees pouring out of Rwanda, and withdrew from Somalia after four years of humanitarian operations. These operations have not been inexpensive; they have cost billions of dollars and dozens of American lives. U.S. military involvement with faltering and failing states takes many forms. 1 Actual combat may be involved, against opponents ranging from criminal gangs possessing little more than light infantry weapons to semiprofessional armies boasting artillery and armor. 2 In other circumstances, "nation building" activities, such as road building, water purification, and power restoration, make up the bulk of the efforts. Additional tasks have included advising on clearing land mines, providing security escorts to representatives of humanitarian organizations, serving as an interim police force, evacuating foreign nationals, or simply maintaining an offshore military presence. As 1995 demonstrated, states can fail in any portion of the populated globe. The preparation time given U.S. military planners to respond to these missions can range from months to only days; actual involvement may last from weeks to years, with a proportionate range of costs. Additionally, in an era of shrinking resources and limited force structure, it is all the more significant that units committed to these missions are likely to be unavailable for other operations. Therefore, military leaders are among the decision makers who have a vested interest in being able to predict more accurately which states are likely to fail. Others with this interest would include the president, senior diplomats in the State Department, and the directors of humanitarian nongovernmental organizations. Early identification of candidates for failure would allow time to list required assets and prepare detailed contingency plans. If, as we shall argue, traditional economic aid does not significantly help states that are at high risk of failure, early identification could also aid in forestalling the authorization of costly and unproductive civil affairs or nation-building missions. In fact, early warning can provide time to debate usefully whether the military should be involved at all, and if it should, what shape the participation should take. Despite the frequent and prominent involvement of the U.S. military, dealing with faltering and failed states is primarily a diplomatic issue. Traditionally, development aid has been viewed as an essential element in preventing states from failing. Development aid has included military nation building and civil affairs projects, not only as routine peacetime operations but also as part of disaster response packages and postconflict assistance. These projects are often funded solely by the regional commanders in chief or the military services. Attempts to apply this aid have frequently been lengthy and quite costly. 3 Yet notwithstanding the costs that were borne, these efforts have restored very few failing states to health. Debates regarding the efficient and effective application of current fiscally constrained military budgets have become commonplace, both within and outside the military services. A factor in this debate may be a dawning anxiety about the wisdom of "high risk, low return" investments in failing states, investments that may yield little or no positive return. For these reasons it seems to us that military planners and decision makers should be interested in considering new approaches toward aiding failing and faltering states. 4 One such approach would recognize that the economic, social, and political conditions in failing states are so adverse that they merit qualitatively different treatment by the United States. Too often, U.S. foreign aid and military assistance policies have dealt with failing states as if they were no different from other underdeveloped and poor nations. Traditional programs were designed for less dire situations and can, at best, only moderate the symptoms, not cure such diseases. Thus, continued spending on traditional forms of foreign aid for these states is not the most cost-effective strategy in an era of scarce resources. A better approach--akin to "triage" for battlefield wounds--would limit aid in these cases to short-term humanitarian assistance, like disaster relief. These states do not offer fertile soil for economic development assistance undertakings that are long-term or require sustained maintenance by the host country. Thus, environmental, education, and family planning projects funded by the Agency for International Development, or military "civic action" support for school reconstruction and public health system development, would be recognized as essentially futile. Examples of nations in such dire straits would have included Rwanda and Somalia: years of aid were not successful in promoting self-sustaining economic growth and stability--if they had been, operations RESTORE HOPE and SUPPORT HOPE would not have been necessary. A prerequisite to formulating any new approach to these states is to be able to distinguish accurately states that are failing or faltering from the larger group of underdeveloped states that, while poor, are not so near extremis. Making this type of distinction between poor and failing states may be even more important for military leaders today than in the past, because decisions about aid and military "humanitarian" operations are often heavily influenced by the emotions of the public and their elected representatives. This emotional response is triggered by the world media, when they telecast gripping visual images of suffering from wherever on the globe their attention is focused. To a large extent, this is as it should be; in a democracy, the people ought to decide how much money should be spent on foreign aid and to which states the resources should be dedicated. On one hand, the public will find if difficult to make these judgments without at least some information from the media; on the other hand, however, the media's focus is normally only short-term. Appreciating the complex problems in faltering and failing states requires a more significant investment in time than the media are ordinarily willing to invest. Objectively distinguishing states that are faltering and failing from those that are "only" poor may enable military and political leaders the better to explain policies and decisions. A logical first step, then, toward a systematic approach is to develop a reliable method to identify faltering and failing states before they fail. Ideally, such a methodology would also be useful for evaluating apparent improvements made by a failing state--to distinguish the signals of genuine, sustainable progress from the noise of false starts and empty promises. In other words, policy makers could thereby determine when the conditions in a failing state had stabilized or had begun so to improve that development aid, including nation-building and civil affairs operations performed by military units, could be fruitfully resumed. The purpose of this article is to stimulate discussion about a methodology that could be used for identifying the failing states of today and tomorrow. What this article will not do is attempt to determine exactly how much money the United States should spend on foreign aid, or how much of the Defense Department's budget should be reserved for dealing with faltering and failing states. Nor will it attempt to determine how individual foreign aid projects should be evaluated or which specific programs are the most effective. These important issues deserve separate consideration. We are, of course, not the first to observe or comment upon "failing states." Others have preceded us in documenting the phenomenon and have framed the borders of the debate. They remind us that the current policy debates should focus more on the problems of failed and faltering states and less on such issues as the potential merits of consolidating Washington's foreign policy bureaucracies. One scholar, Robert Kaplan, has provided a disturbing and pessimistic analysis of failing states. 5 According to Kaplan, most of the nation-states in West Africa have virtually ceased to govern in any meaningful way. All along a coastal crescent from Nigeria west to Liberia, national governments have been overwhelmed by extreme poverty, disease, crime, and anarchic violence. Endemic civil wars and clan violence will almost inevitably make necessary some form of military protection and involvement in aid efforts if these nations are to have any hope of achieving even limited success. Worse, Kaplan sees no real cure for the sociopathology of several West African states. Foreign aid, even if administered under military protection, will have no lasting effect other than to reduce the fiscal and other resources of the contributing countries. Any aid that the United States provides to the failed states of West Africa, he argues, will be no more than a sop to American domestic interest groups. If ailing and fallen trees may be used as an analogy for faltering and failed states, Kaplan might characterize the cause of failure as poor soil. By contrast, Gerald B. Helman and Steven B. Ratner would instead blame shallow roots. 6 In their view, many of the states that were created or that gained independence after World War II were simply not well prepared to face the daunting challenges of the 1980s and 1990s. Helman and Ratner perceive the situation for these states as serious but not entirely hopeless. The cure they propose is "conservatorship," under which the United Nations would directly supervise or actually take over the government of a failed state until it became fully capable of administering its own affairs. 7 U.S. military and political leaders should immediately understand, these authors warn, that such a conservatorship would inevitably involve American military participation in some form or another. Taking the ailing-tree analogy a step further, Paul Kennedy would identify neither shallow roots nor poor soil as the cause of failure; he would ascribe the blame to gypsy moths and insufficient rain. Every state in the world faces figurative gypsy moth swarms, e.g., transnational problems like environmental degradation and AIDS. The least advanced states are too poor to buy their way out of these problems, and they do not get enough rain (in the form of investment or foreign aid) to save themselves. As a result, they may be doomed to the chaos that Kaplan saw in West Africa. Conversely, the most advanced states possess, or can afford, pest control, irrigation, and well-drilling equipment; that is, their educated populations and research and technology infrastructures give them the wherewithal to meet or adjust to transnational challenges. Kennedy's solution to the problem of faltering and failing states would be to launch international crusades against these transnational problems and to invest more heavily in the economic development of states that are falling behind. 8 Participation of the U.S. military in this solution would not be surprising. Each of these solutions raises some very thorny questions. Which states outside West Africa would people write off? Are all of the West African states lost causes? Will these states be lost causes forever? Which states would others put under conservatorship? Practically everyone concedes that conservatorship is so expensive that the international community could afford to handle very few cases at any given time. That being so, which failed nations would be placed on a "waiting list," condemned to anarchy until their turn for conservatorship came up? Or would an international crusade attempt to rescue all poor states simultaneously? If their number is too great, which states would be rescued first? What might be done for the others while they collapse? Answering these questions requires a methodology--a taxonomy for identifying failing and faltering states. We will offer such a taxonomy and suggest how it could be applied in practice. Our taxonomy comprises nine sets of measurements, grouped into three main categories. The first category assesses the trends in the living conditions of a state's population, with emphasis on whether factors that might favor economic development are better or worse than in other developing states. The measurements of the second category appraise the capacity of the private-sector economy to improve living conditions, over both the long and short terms. The third category evaluates the capacity of the governmental structure to maintain or improve the economic infrastructure, the foundation on which the economy would begin improving living conditions. In order to apply these measurements, it is necessary to devise certain criteria by which to evaluate a state's performance. We have color-coded the basic assessments that might be assigned each criterion. Red "tiles" represent conditions that are substantially worse than the average for all developing nations, yellow tiles indicate a status near that average, and green denotes conditions substantially above it. When the results in each of the three categories are combined, a "mosaic" emerges, a picture of a state's health. Although an infinite number of gradations are possible, we place states, like the criteria, into one of three lists--also coded green, yellow, and red. Green states appear to be in no danger of failure; red marks those that are already failing or have a strong possibility of doing so; whereas states in the yellow list are faltering--they stand at a crossroads and could go either way. These are very broad categories, and the boundaries tend to blur. Like all mosaics, the overall "picture" for any given state is likely to contain tiles of different colors; the final determination would be based on the predominate one. Thus a state might have widespread poverty, and receive a red tile for that, but nevertheless be coded yellow or even green overall, depending upon how this single criterion stacked up against others. The mosaic analogy is not perfect, inasmuch as it calls to mind a static image, a snapshot. A single data point simply cannot give an accurate depiction of a state's potential for failure. In Figure 1 we indicate an improving trend by an upward-pointing arrow; a negative trend would be represented by a downward one, whereas the absence of an arrow would indicate stagnation (unless the tile was green, when absence of an arrow would reflect stability). Analysis of trend data is crucial if one is to distinguish between a state heading toward failure and a poor but viable nation. For example, data demonstrating improving trends would suggest that a state is likely to survive; negative trends or stagnation in a "red" or "yellow" state could represent the opposite. It is also important to note that this methodology does not provide a date by which a certain country will fail, or even a guarantee of failure. Its value, as stated earlier, lies in identifying those states that warrant a different foreign-aid approach--not the reverse, i.e., those for which maintenance of traditional foreign aid schemes is appropriate. It may also be helpful to remember that this evaluation system makes no value judgment about the nature of a state's government. Neither does it measure the intentions of its political leadership; responding to intent is the province of foreign policy, not aid policy. For example, though a state ruled by a corrupt but effective dictator might not be considered "failing" by our methodology, the United States might decide, for policy reasons, to suspend aid until democratic reforms were implemented. Social Conditions Category One primarily addresses the social conditions of a state. We have selected three measurements to represent this category--poverty, literacy, and also mortality (the death rate) and morbidity (incidence of disease)--because they are related to basic building blocks of economic growth and prosperity. Poverty. Many organizations regularly examine the fiscal health of states, and there are numerous definitions of poverty. Our definition is based on what most experts would agree is the absolute minimum requirement to support one of the most basic of human needs--getting enough food to stay alive. We thus use the methodology of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, which tracks the per capita calories available (as percentage of need). It should be noted that this measure is relatively unconcerned with unequal distribution of resources; many nations, including the United States, have unequal distribution patterns. Literacy. Literacy, the proportion of adults that can read, is widely recognized as an indicator of human development. Statistics on this measurement are collected and used by many international organizations. Obviously, low rates of literacy reflect poor prospects for economic growth and must discourage private-sector investments. A trend indicating a lack of improvement in the literacy rate is also an indicator that the governmental and private-sector infrastructures lack the capability to administer basic social programs that are preconditions for economic development. Because the focus of this taxonomy is on identifying states that may not be suited for traditional forms of aid, this measurement deals with the overall rate of literacy. In many states there are significant differences between the education offered to men and women; in such states the adult male population has a higher literacy rate than the adult female group. In other countries there are significant disparities in the literacy rates of different ethnic groups. These are important issues, but they do not necessarily indicate that a state is failing or faltering. For example, women have a much lower literacy rate than men in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Syria--three nations that are relatively advanced economically. 9 Mortality and morbidity. This measurement seeks out nations that are substantially worse off than other developing states in these two related areas and have been unable to register improvements in recent years. It is not intended simply to identify states where disease is more prevalent than in Western Europe or North America. Statistics on life expectancy and infant mortality are the two most widely compiled measurements of mortality and morbidity. In conjunction with data on the government's expenditures on health, these statistics provide meaningful insight into a state's capacity for economic growth. Unfortunately, figures on central government expenditures for health are not available for many developing countries; also, World Bank and World Health Organization reports do not include data on public health budgets from any of the nations that have high mortality or morbidity rates. 10 As with low literacy rates, high mortality and morbidity is likely to discourage private investment from abroad. Further, if mortality and morbidity rates are higher than the average for all developing countries and are not improving, the likelihood exists that there are serious deficiencies in the governmental and private-sector infrastructures. Private Sector Category Two deals with the capacity of the private sector to improve living conditions. To represent this category we have chosen three measurements--inflation, emigration, and infrastructure--that, taken together, give an indication of a state's capacity to survive economically in the global economy. Inflation. Every state, at one time or another, suffers peak levels of inflation. Many have also experienced episodes of hyperinflation. Sustained hyperinflation is an important indicator that a state may be headed for failure. However, inflation figures may be highly volatile. On one hand, a long-term trend of rising inflation does not bode well; consistent inflation indicates underlying governmental difficulties, and also that more than short-term improvement will be required to dampen consumer, domestic, and foreign-investor expectations about inflation. On the other hand, even a brief period of hyperinflation may be enough to damage severely a state's chances of avoiding failure. For this and other measurements, then, though the trend is important, it is also necessary to note the impact of current conditions. Emigration. As with inflation, most states have been "sending" countries at one time or another. In most cases, voluntary emigration has benefited both sender and receiver. Dividends have included increased foreign exchange in the form of remittances; relief of unemployment and population pressures; and the opportunity to improve the living condition of the migrant. However, excessive levels of migration may add to difficulties imposed by high morbidity and mortality rates. Another potential negative effect is "brain-drain," the emigration of technical and professional personnel essential to the maintenance of industry, services, and government administration. Very general data regarding outward migration flows are collected by the UN and the World Bank. The U.S. State Department and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees provide data for worldwide refugee flows and the internal movements of displaced persons. (These data, incidentally, are often in conflict with those reported by sending and receiving countries.) Taken together, despite their shortcomings these figures can be used to derive some useful trend data. Infrastructure. "Infrastructure" is often taken to refer to public goods, such as highways and airports, or private assets like telephones. Such measures as telephones per capita are significant. If the trend is positive, it is an indication that a platform for economic growth is being erected and that the state involved is neither faltering nor failing. An important, if less concrete, example of a private infrastructure good is a state banking system, and further, the amounts entrusted to it by private citizens. If a state suffers from severe economic problems and has no mechanisms for encouraging savings, its platform for economic growth is probably even weaker than more tangible public goods might indicate alone. It may seem counterintuitive to discuss savings in poor states, but the evidence indicates that they do exist. The strength of these savings and their related programs are important to foreign investors, who view their absence as a sign of serious problems. Such shortcomings usually stem from manipulations by vested interests of a state's economy for their own gain, implying that there are insufficient incentives for free enterprise. Government Strength Category Three addresses a government's ability and willingness to invest in the improvements to state infrastructure required to support economic growth. As with Categories One and Two, we have chosen three measurements to represent this category--border control, law and order, and government action. Efforts to improve infrastructure and promote growth are long-term ones and require significant investments at least of organized sweat equity (e.g., equity resulting from labor invested) in operations and maintenance. A certain amount of security is necessary for both the state's exposure and that of donors of foreign aid and sponsors of military civil affairs projects. What is important here is to measure not a state's ability to provide security for individual projects or locations but rather its overall capacity and willingness to provide it. Although a certain amount of data regarding the following three measurements is available from a variety of sources, the final rating of a given state in this category must be a subjective one. Border control. Although the state-centric model of the international political system may no longer be as powerful as it once was, states are likely to remain the most important actors in the international arena for the foreseeable future. One of the primary functions of any state is to control its borders, in order to regulate commerce, maintain security, exercise its legal system, and so forth. Its capacity to do so is a valuable litmus test of the viability of a state's central government. An inability to perform this function also suggests significant problems in other areas. Law and order. Maintaining internal order is a second key measure of a government's--and state's--prospects. In extreme cases the ability of the central government to guarantee the safety of its citizens stops at the doorways of a few federal buildings in the capital. The presence of criminal-controlled enclaves, rampant criminal activity, the failure or incompetence of government police forces, and a lack of public belief in the efficacy of government law enforcement all point to potentially serious, even fatal, flaws. Other indicators in this category would be civil wars or armed and effective resistance groups. Where the latter are present, there is almost always an obvious and direct tie-in with control of borders. Government action. The final criterion in Category Three, government ability and willingness to act, cuts directly to the capability of a central government. In some cases, it is so weak that it is unable to perform. (Robert Kaplan would say that all West African states, for instance, would receive a red tile for this measurement.) In other cases, the government does have the means to act but fails to do so because of corruption, ineptitude, or misplaced priorities. Such a state may have significant natural resources, financial assets, or a public-sector and economic infrastructure but be led by an individual or group that has abrogated the responsibilities of government. Such regimes, in effect, cause their state to fail in order to advance their own interests, e.g., Idi Amin in Uganda. Sometimes their attitude leads only to insurrection and revolution, but the result may be the failure of the state itself. A Special Challenge For the purposes of illustration we have chosen to apply this methodology (retroactively) to Somalia for the 1980-1990 time frame. 11 The results are indicated in Figure 2. Insufficient information is available to assess the color of certain tiles, but we would argue that the preponderance of red tiles and downward-pointing arrows for the period would have indicated Somalia's potential failure to such U.S. policy makers as joint commanders in chief in the years preceding its collapse. For brevity we present only one example in this article; however, our work with other cases suggests that this methodology warrants continued and deeper investigation. It should be reemphasized that the final determination of a state's potential for failure rests on no single area. For example, in the United States (a nation that is not deemed in danger of failure) one could cite failure to control borders and high crime rates as potentially serious problems. It is the combination of data and trends across all three categories that allows one to assign a color code to an individual state. There are difficulties inherent in this taxonomy. Currently, there is no single, central location where the required information can be obtained. The Central Intelligence Agency does not now maintain a central database. Some elements of the data reside at the Department of State, others at the UN, and still others at private organizations. In some areas the figures are unreliable or nonexistent. We would therefore recommend as a starting point the establishment of a central repository for the required information, one that is unclassified and accessible to all. The material should be gathered overtly, either by the countries themselves or by reputable research teams. Although the CIA might be the most logical custodian (already possessing, as it does, the tools of data collection and assimilation), its national intelligence function may make it politically unsuited to this role. The UN, despite its significant inefficiencies and multilayered bureaucracies, would seem the best home for this global database, despite the enormous political pressures sometimes applied to portray a "rosy picture." Data now obtainable is sketchy, unreliable, or nonexistent for some countries and regions, and for significant historical periods of time. The reason may be an inability on the part of the state to collect such data (perhaps in itself an indicator of a problem) or reluctance to publicize poor performance. Data can be falsified to make a state look better (or worse, in an effort to attract aid) than it actually is. To begin to correct these potential flaws, states might be required to submit data as part of the price of admission to the United Nations, or as a prerequisite for UN assistance and funding. Random verification could ascertain the validity of reported figures, although we suspect that many nongovernmental organizations would voluntarily serve, in effect, as watchdogs. Measurements requiring a subjective judgment pose a special challenge. The U.S. ambassador to a state should obviously be consulted. However, this does raise the issue of possible "clientism," and it could place an ambassador who submitted a negative input in a potentially difficult position. The regional commander in chief should also be brought in, especially in regard to the capacity of the military branches of a government, which are, in some cases, responsible for internal security. A better solution, in our opinion, would be for the Central Intelligence Agency (or the United Nations) to be the central collection point. These data could then be forwarded for review by a senior interagency working group (IWG), which would submit recommendations to the National Security Council for decision. There is no reason why private relief organizations could not have representatives on this IWG. (Selecting an appropriately experienced individual to represent this large and diverse community would seem to be a challenge best solved by the "relief community" itself.) In this manner, civil and military attempts to provide developmental aid could be directed toward those areas where they would do the most long-term good; advance planning could be undertaken for humanitarian responses to states at high risk of collapse; and nations recovering from failure could be channeled the right form of assistance. Over time, it appears, such a consistent approach would both most wisely invest donor assets and provide the most long-lasting benefit to those in need. Notes 1. States like the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia may be thought of having failed in the same sense that the Holy Roman Empire failed--they are now "extinct." Obviously, extinct states are not contenders for U.S. aid or other forms of assistance; on the other hand, in the late 1980s and early 1990s Czechoslovakia and other states were in fact approaching political failure. A foreign aid taxonomy must distinguish between political failures that are "positive" (e.g., consistent with U.S. national interests or reflective of the political consensus in, or economic self-interest of, the affected country) and those that are negative, as in Somalia, where there was widespread anarchy and starvation. 2. This statement should not be taken as minimizing the difficulties of any variety of combat but merely as pointing out the range of capabilities possessed by potential opponents. 3. The authors recognize that American foreign aid spending actually constitutes less than 6 percent of the total U.S. budget and that the majority of foreign aid is predisbursed to Israel, Egypt, Greece, and Turkey. (The wisdom of that may be debated, but it is not the subject of this article.) Nevertheless, development efforts are expensive in terms of real dollars spent and even more so in proportion to the foreign aid budget consumed. 4. According to U.S. News & World Report (Tim Zimmerman, 12 February 1996, p. 42), Vice President Al Gore requested that the Central Intelligence Agency study this problem. For the Agency response, see D.C. Esty, J.A. Goldstone, T.R. Gurr, P.T. Surko, and A.N. Unger, "State Failure Task Force Report," Working Paper for the Central Intelligence Committee (Washington: November 1995). 5. Robert D. Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994, pp. 44-76. 6. Gerald B. Helman and Steven B. Ratner, "Saving Failed States," Foreign Policy, Winter 1992-1993, pp. 3-21. 7. Ibid., pp. 12-5. 8. Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1993). 9. World Bank, World Bank Development Report 1994 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), p. 163. 10. World Bank, pp. 180-1; World Health Organization, The World Health Report 1995 (Geneva: 1995), pp. 105-8. 11. Sources for this example include the World Bank's World Development Reports (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995); U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, World Population Profile 1994 (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1994) and Demographic, Economic, Social Statistics for the World (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1996); World Resources Institute, World Resources 1994-5: Guide to the Global Environment; and World Health Organization. Dr. Miskel is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College. During the Reagan and Bush administrations he served on the National Security Council as Director for Defense Policy and Arms Control. Dr. Miskel's doctorate is in modern European and Soviet history; he is the author of Buying Trouble? National Security and Reliance on Foreign Industry (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1993). Commander Norton recently retired from the U.S. Navy, after spending his last three years of active duty as a faculty member of the National Security Decision Making Department at the Naval War College. He is currently an adjunct professor of international relations at Florida International University and a Ph.D candidate at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. His most recent publication was National Security Decision Making, vol. II, Case Studies in Contingency Operations, which he coedited with Professor Miskel (Naval War College Press, 1994). [Return to top] -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'